How much longer until my computer is useless?

[brianl703]

Originally Posted By: Tim H.

You make me feel old! I remember when I was a sophomore in high school we got 6 new 'state of the art' Apple 2 plus's in 1982!


They still had those 'state of the art' Apple 2 plus's when I was a senior in HS in 1995....

 

[Propflux01]

Guess the school funding was a bit lean in your school, eh?

 

[Crashbox]

In my opinion computers nowadays don't go obsolete nearly as fast as they used to, simply because their sheer speed keeps them usable much longer. Shoot, I'm still happy with my AMD Athlon 64 3200 circa November 2003- though I upgraded the memory to DDR400/ECC and also the video card a couple of years ago.

 

[labman]

That is about what I bought a year ago as a cheap upgrade. By going with Debian, I have a good system for under $200. I have a gig of RAM and am using on board video.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: Crashbox
In my opinion computers nowadays don't go obsolete nearly as fast as they used to, simply because their sheer speed keeps them usable much longer. Shoot, I'm still happy with my AMD Athlon 64 3200 circa November 2003- though I upgraded the memory to DDR400/ECC and also the video card a couple of years ago.


Mine is Athlon XP 1600. Wanna trade?

 

[occupant]

July 2002 on my Optiplex GX260, P4 1.8, onboard video, Dell KB/HP mouse, 19" Samsung CRT, and I just upgraded it last month to 2GB of RAM. Coming from 512MB, and running Windows 2000 SP4, it's a whole another world. Feels great except when playing games or HD/HQ YouTube videos. No one makes a good low power, low profile, PCI video card for this SFF desktop. So I'll do without. And when it comes time to build a new box, Tiger and NewEgg will help me out making a quad-core monster with 8GB of RAM, a ridiculously priced video card, and enough goodies to make any Counterstrike fanboy wet himself. And all just to say I have it. Which is so American, it makes me sick. Maybe it's because I have been running used beater surplus computers all my life, and although they have more than served their purpose for prices ranging from free to $60, I'm treating myself to something nice next time.

 

[Geonerd]

Your computer is more than fine!

OK, so it won't play modern games at high res with all the eye candy. Other than that, it's MORE than sufficient for gaming, surfing, office work, photoshop, etc.

If forced to file a 'complaint,' I'd point to the stripped down Audigy SE (shame on Creative for abusing the Audigy brand) The card lacks a 'real' hardware sound processor and is more akin to the on-board chips found on most motherboards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Audigy#Sound_Blaster_Audigy_2_SE It's not awful, but will put more load on the CPU than a 'real' Audigy(2) would. The only time this will matter is when playing games with lots of sound sources enabled.

When/if you run out of storage, a newer/faster HD might speed things up noticeably. (What are you running now?) In my experience, the 'migration' utilities work flawlessly, transferring your OS, apps, etc. to the new HD without disturbing a thing.

FWIW. Apart from this modest Socket A rig, I've got two old XP-M (AMD low power mobile chip) based computers hanging about. One is overclocked a little, stuffed 3G of ram, (performance slightly better than your beast) and is dedicated to digital image editing. It drives my film scanner and does just fine photoshopping and tweaking the resultant monster files. The other computer is hooked to the stereo, and spends its days running a digital jukebox. The poor thing must be bored to tears.